


I Swallow Glass

by damalur



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-22
Updated: 2010-01-23
Packaged: 2017-10-06 13:46:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the story of the last classic practical joke of Sheldon Cooper, and how Penny has her revenge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title and excerpts from Richard Siken's [Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177722).

  


  
_I can already tell you think I'm the dragon,_  
that would be so like me, but I'm not. I'm not the dragon.  
I'm not the princess either.

\-----

"I," he says, and his throat bobs. "But I'd thought—"

"Oh, sweetie," Penny says, "sweetie, sweetie. Did you _really_?" Her smile is hard-edged and saccharine, with just the right trace of pity to unnerve him.

She can do that.

\-----

This is the story of the last classic practical joke of Sheldon Cooper.

Before, there is Penny. Penny is twenty-five and ordinary. She is always ordinary. She is not brilliant, she is not even smart, she does not have useful skills like reciting the filming locations of _Star Wars_ or calculating pi to the _n_th digit or building an outer-space waste disposal system. Her only power is the power to be Penny, and that she does reluctantly, as uncomfortable in her own skin as she should be in anyone else's.

The acting is an answer, not a career path. Don't give her that much credit.

\-----

And even before, she is nineteen and running.

\-----

Leonard's mother has the wrong idea. She tells Leonard to take responsibility for his girlfriend's orgasms, as if it is that simple, as if it is that clear-cut. (Maybe that's the power a doctorate bestows: clarity of vision.) Penny has been taking responsibility for her own orgasms for longer than she's been with Leonard, for longer than she's lived in California. At times her orgasms are the only thing for which she takes responsibility.

They don't break up because the sex is bad. They break up because Penny is twenty-five and tired, not the half-fond half-frustrated tired that leads her peers and sisters to sit out the dating game for a handful of weeks, but the wholly-exhausted tired that lives in your bones, that sinks right down to your core.

She shuts the door tiredly and presses her forehead against the cool wood. To this point her life has been measured in men, because the only other alternative is to measure her life in years and bad choices. Buried in her deep, down below her ribcage, is that final spark.

She closes the door on Leonard but thinks, tiredly, that maybe her life has the strength for one more yet.

Don't think she's right. She doesn't deserve that sort of credit.

Leonard _simpers_. If Penny had superpowers, she would hate that about him.

\-----

Sheldon lives across the hall and makes fun of her name. She's never liked her name; more properly, she's never liked her father's name. In school she was the girl who doodled _Penny Pitt_ and _Penny Wagner_ and _Penny Little_ inside her notebooks and now she is the sort of woman who doodles _Penny Hofstadter_ on the backs of her grocery lists. Except lately it hasn't been _Penny Hofstadter_ she writes, idly, when she isn't paying attention; lately, it's been _Penny Cooper_.

She decides that Sheldon is a better choice. Sheldon is not taking advantage of her because she is nineteen and alone, and he isn't offering her a new degradation in a different skin. Sheldon takes care of her, even if it's in a weird obnoxious half-grudging way, but he comes through when it counts; didn't he lend her money for her rent, and drive her to the hospital that one time, and _their arguments light her up like fire from within_.

Her realization isn't half so fast, and twice the time passes before she realizes he might just be in love with her back. That thought coils in her belly and warms her up when the days get too long.

\-----

The state of the universe in apartment 4A is about to explode her brain, and Sheldon isn't even trying.

"Shut. UP," she roars, and Howard and Leonard zip it. Raj twists the cap on his water bottle and continues to be totally incapable of speech. Sometimes she wishes she were ugly or something, just so he'd talk to her.

"—James Cameron's work is highly _derivative_," Sheldon sniffs. "I would no more—"

"That means you, PBS Special." She nails him on the chest with a forefinger, but it's friendly rather than unkind. Even though he scowls at her, he quiets.

"Okay, everyone who wants to see Avatar, go stand over there," she orders, and Howard and Leonard and Raj do a weird clustershuffle to the door. With her hands on her hips she looks like a statue, or a model for something punk-cute, or the high monarch of the living room.

"Everyone who doesn't have twelve-fifty for a ticket, stand by the free cable machine."

"It's called a television—"

"The _free cable machine_," Penny repeats, perching herself on the edge of Sheldon's desk. "Now. Where do we stand?"

Where they stand is with Sheldon smack in the middle, his arms folded across his chest in that perpetual expression of disapproval, discomfort, apathy, hunger, and curiosity.

"And everyone who thinks Avatar is Pocahontas with space-smurfs, stand in the middle," she finishes. "Okay, then, I'll see you guys later!" She beams and shoos them to the hall, managing to fish Leonard's keys out of their hiding place and refill Raj's water in the process. When she shuts the door and spins around, Sheldon is still there, like the corner of the rug is a very small territory he's won for himself. (From barbarian hordes, mayhaps.)

"You're still here...why?"

"Do you need to visit an audiologist?" he asks.

"Yeah, well, I thought you'd go anyway and complain your way through it."

"Mmf." He reminds her of a newborn giraffe when he fidgets. "Money isn't a limitless resource, and—what does your schedule dictate we do?"

She stares; she can't help but stare. "What?"

"What are you planning to do?"

"Watch a movie. I guess. Or if you want to do something else—"

"No. No, a movie is acceptable. I wouldn't want to interrupt your plans."

She flicks through channels and settles on Lifetime for a couple of minutes just to annoy him, but he doesn't so much as twitch. The clocks hits eight, and through an intricate sequence of randomly pushed buttons she manages to make the television land on an old Indiana Jones movie—none of that new crap with aliens and commies; this is _Raiders of the Lost Ark_, where Nazis lurk around every corner and there's always a shaman or two ready to fuck you over.

"Oh, hey," she says, the mildness deceptive.

Sheldon squirms in his chair. Sometimes she loves his weirdness, _adores_ it, practically worships his strange, snickering laugh and how he writes on an invisible blackboard when he thinks he's alone in a room, and then there are times when she just wants him to shut up and act like a human being. Or sit like one, at any rate, instead of posed like a poor imitation of _The Thinker_, which is how he sits even when he's watching a movie or whatever. Isn't he uncomfortable, she wonders.

"There's not much of a romantic subplot in this," Sheldon points out.

"Yeah, no. There really is."

He lets out a little whiffle of air. "It's still not your usual fare."

"Uh-huh." Onscreen Indy yanks his revolver out and shoots his opponent (sword-wielding bastard no. 19) right in the gut. She's always adored that scene; it was scripted as an elaborate sequence pitting whip against scimitar, but the day was late and the star was tired and Harrison Ford, good old Harrison Ford supposedly said, _Can't I just shoot 'em?_

"Any of George Lucas's films are a far cry from the Lake House—although Attack of the Clones did have some remarkably—"

"Sheldon. _If_ I tell you how you can wedge this into the category of things-Penny-likes, will you stop trying to make small talk?"

He looks taken aback that any of his talk could be considered _small_, but she figured out a long time ago that Sheldon thinks of his ideas like most guys think of their dicks.

_If._ She regrets saying that three seconds after the words vomit out her mouth, because is this really something she wants to share with Sheldon?

"I didn't realize you found my conversational gambits so dull," he says, and then, after the commercials finish, "And you don't need—unless you'd like to explain."

"Oh," she says, surprised. "No, I guess—"

\-----

He's always going off about alternate universes.

In one world, she doesn't tell him. Laughs it off, feeds him some line about how hot Harrison Ford is, heads home at ten to feed her metaphorical fish. (She doesn't have fish. Can't keep them alive, not after she won that stupid goldfish in the ring toss at her grade school's fun fair. It wasn't much fun for the fish, was it, after he turned belly-up in his plastic bag as she carried him home carefully, so carefully, with one hand cupped under the bag to keep it from jostling. They buried the goldfish that evening in an old sardine tin. Her mother dug the hole.)

In the goldfish universe, she's never met a man she can trust with the silly little things that live in the bottom of her soul, so she blows Sheldon off and goes home. Woman: infinite mystery.

\-----

In another world, something he says hooks up with the scribbled shopping-list names, and she decides, _Yes_.

"It's just," she says, and stops, and has to start again. "You know how when you're fifteen, and you go to the dollar theater with your friends and they all want to sleep with Doctor Jones? Well, maybe you don't. But—I didn't want to sleep with Harrison Ford, I want to _be_ him."

What Sheldon doesn't say: _Wouldn't sharing a bed disturb your sleep cycle?_ in that creepy-innocent way of his. What he says: "How, exactly, is that abnormal?"

And then she is twenty-five and falling.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the story of the last classic practical joke of Sheldon Cooper, and how Penny has her revenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpts from Richard Siken's [Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177722). Penny's screenplay is what I imagine would have been the result had Robin McKinley written the Dark Tower series. This part, okay, I don't even know what is going on.

If she were a real actor with a real job, she'd be the sort of character the masses hate to hate. _She's so stupid,_ they'd say, _girl next door, couldn't they come up with anyone better?_

_Well, she's only there to be the love interest, anyway. Not like she matters._

_Yeah, but couldn't they have gotten someone hotter?_

_Jesus._

\-----

Another of the little things: The farm she grew up on, that's not her father's; it's her mother's, handed down matrilineally from Cassie Clarke. Grandma Cassie had no husband but the land, which she worked from the day she was born until the day she keeled over in the middle of furrowing the back field. The land went to Penny's mother, who married one of the hands and left Nebraska only twice in her entire life.

One among the many things Penny doesn't understand, has never understood, is why her mother married her father. Her mom is a wiry, small woman, not so much tanned as caramelized by so many lives under the sun, but at least her mom knows how to crack a smile and _mean_ it.

\-----

At the mailbox Sheldon reaches over her shoulder. He's probably two, three inches from her, and the possibility of that space is supercharged; if she takes half a step back, she expects that sparks would jump and crackle between their skins.

When she was growing up, the whole family used to pack up the livestock trailers once a year and drive to Grand Island for the State Fair. After the 4-H classes were over for the day, Penny would run the grounds like a wild creature, gorging on cotton candy and riding the scrambler 'til she made herself sick. At night the fair lit up and people were packed shoulder to shoulder and the world was blinding and mysterious; she used to feel like the air itself was some magic elixir, something strong and heady that caught her blood on fire. That's what having Sheldon at her back is, that same blazing rush.

The fabric of his shirt whispers past her ear as he moves to the trashcan and (_thwap thwap thwap_) starts shuffling through envelopes.

"Hey. Sheldon," she says, casual, off-the-cuff and desperately so. "What do you think about Stuart?"

His fingers stutter to a halt, but the heavy-lidded look he gives her is as dispassionate as ever. "Am I required to have an opinion?"

"Well, no. I guess not." She twists the lock on her own mailbox, shoves solicitations and _Cosmo_ under her arm, and picks up her purse. "But I kinda thought you would. I mean, we're friends, aren't we?"

"You did do better on my survey than Koothrappali," he says; Penny is less sure that's a compliment to her than a dig at Raj, but okay. "I suppose since we make casual conversation, eat together on a regular basis, and are aware of each other's scheduled bowel movements, be could be classified as...as such."

"First, _ew_. Second, how do you know—you know what? Never mind." She starts for the staircase and Sheldon trails behind, like she's holding an invisible lead that compels him to follow.

Halfway up the second flight, he clears his throat. "I'm thinking about starting a cricket-breeding program."

"...What?"

He rolls his whole head impatiently. "Crickets. Since Howard correctly identified the specimen that we captured behind the refrigerator"—of course, he doesn't admit that he was _wrong_, God only knows what would happen if he did (but Penny thinks the skies would split open and Heidi Klum would appear on Howard's doorstep)—"I've decided to research them, a little side-project if you will. Entomology is a fascinating field, which is why, Penny, I wanted to request your assistance."

"With _crickets_?" She huffs her way across the landing between floors three and four. "Sheldon, why would you think I know anything about _crickets_?"

The expression that crosses his face is an odd blend of amusement and bemusement; he's two steps below her, so it's one of the rare occasions she can look him dead in the eye. (Heels aside, she'd liked that about Leonard—liked that she could meet him face-to-face.)

"I would think that you'd know all about animal husbandry," Sheldon says. "After all—"

"You don't want to finish that," Penny says, mildly.

"But—"

"Good _night_, Sheldon," she snaps, and wrenches her door open with such force that she pulls a muscle in her shoulder.

\-----

She is nineteen and running. Her entire life is packed in the trunk of her car and the back of her mind, shoved down with all sorts of useless memories: how to rope a calf and what pistachio ice cream tastes like and the feel of her mother's fingers in her hair—things no up-and-coming movie star needs to know. When she hits the road, she is overwhelmed with fear and solitude and life. She thinks there must be a name for this feeling, but she doesn't know what that name would be.

If each moment is a microcosm of its own universe, then in yet another world, Penny is nineteen and running.

\-----

The call comes one slow afternoon while she's watching Sheldon set up her wireless network. "You don't have the settings on your router correct," he informs her. "You might as well keep stealing our connection. Why don't you come over and pillage our food while you're at it, and here, go ahead and have my shoes."

"That's why I asked you to set this thing up," she fires back, "so I don't have to weasel the WEP key out of Leonard because you change it every five minutes."

He grunts, a strangely mannish sound to come from Sheldon, and jiggles the ethernet wire. "You're irritable today. Are you menstruating?"

"No, Sheldon."

"Hungry?"

"Not right now."

"Ah, that was my best guess. Are you sad?"

"Not really."

"...Regretful?" He pronounces the word as if he's never had a regret in his life. As far as she knows, he hasn't. As far as she knows, Sheldon Cooper has never regretted anything.

"No." She chugs another swig of her Cuba Libre. "No! Why would you think that? I just," she continues, before he takes another crack at deciphering human emotion. "Do you ever feel like your life is spinning out of control? I thought I'd move out here, wait tables for a year or two tops, land a small part, land a bigger part, and then I'd be headlining in my own show and now I have to buy shoes from _Wal-Mart_ because it's the only place I can afford and holy crap, look who I'm talking to, you have your entire friggin' life mapped—" Her voice hitches.

He shuts the lid of her computer. "You're...upset."

"Oh, gee," she says, face hidden in a hand, "you think?"

"Ah." A beat. "There is, however"—he says this slowly, as if he's trying to remember something from long ago—"a certain amount of pleasurable anticipation in not having...realized your full potential."

"Yeah, I guess." Penny sniffs. It never occurs to her that he might envy that freedom, but she thinks envy might just be that faint, foreign note in his voice.

"And you can take comfort in knowing that in some universe, a version of you is likely a superhero," he adds. "I always find that delightful."

"Yeah?"

He finished winding the ethernet cable into a tidy bundle and fishes around for a pen and scrap of paper. "And I suppose you might as well continue to use our network, too, since I—since Leonard is constantly nagging me to be polite." He prints a string of symbols across the back of a Wal-Mart receipt in tidy, angular letters. "This is the passkey; I've changed the network name to 'Cerebro,' so now you won't have to go to—Leonard."

"Thanks, Sheldon," Penny says, and offers him a watery smile. His hands flutter in the air for a moment and then, lightly, he pats her on the shoulder; when her cellphone starts blaring _Sunshine Superman_ he startles back to the far end of the couch.

She drags the back of her hand under her nose and flips the phone open. "Hello?"

"_Hi, is this Penny?_"

"Yes...?"

"_Hi, Penny, my name is Robin Escher. I'm a casting director, and your name came up recently for a pilot I'm working on. Marjorie Noble mentioned that she thought you'd be ideal for the part._"

Penny gaped. She'd done exactly one bit part for Marge Noble in a made-for-TV special, and the woman hadn't even seemed to notice her, and _what_?

"What?" she said, dumbstruck.

"_We're looking for an unknown_"—ouch—"_so if you'd like to read for the part—_"

Penny laughs, a little hysterically, and Sheldon twitches. "Would I _like_ to?" She scrambles for the pen and, just below Sheldon's password, scrawls the address that her personal savior Robin Escher reels off.

When she hangs up, Sheldon fixes her with a quizzical glare.

"Oh my God," she says, only half to herself, "that kind of thing doesn't even _happen_ in real life."

\-----

She gets a callback.

"We'd like you to read with some of the other potential cast members," Robin Escher tells her. "Here's a script."

She flips open the first page immediately, because to that point they've been vague about what the show actually _is_, up to that point it's been all _so you're from Nebraska_ and _blue ribbon in a rodeo, huh_ and _can you do that again, only with more of a Linda-Hamilton-in-Terminator vibe—_

> ACT I, SCENE I
> 
> A figure dressed in a long coat and distinctive hat appears in the doorway of an alien bar. Silhouetted by daylight, she pauses, casually brushing the coat back to reveal the polished handle of a revolver. As she surveys the ruckus inside, a dangerous grin crosses her face.
> 
> This is HARI CREWE, the gunslinger.

When they finally release her, she barrels home and straight through the door of apartment 4A, the script clutched in one hand like a war-trophy.

"Sheldon!" she screeches. "You have _got_ to help me rehearse this!"

\-----

He spends, with her, to the detriment of his work, a cumulative twenty-eight hours running lines.

\-----

Later, she says, "You made me fall in love with you."

He answers, "I did no such thing."

\-----

She gets the part.

When she does, she comes down with a bad case of euphoria. It feels like she's floating, like she's flying, a perfect controlled hurtle into headlong nothingness. Actually _winning_ the role seems like such a small thing compared to what came before—the summer without air conditioning to afford acting lessons and the hours toiling as a waitress and the small matter of running away from home—and like a small thing compared to what she is determined will come next. Because now that she's done this, nothing is impossible, see?

Sheldon is at work. Most of the classes have let out, but she still sashays down the department halls as if the eyes of the world are upon her. When she lets herself into his office, though, she can't contain her excitement one _second_ longer, and she flings herself into Sheldon's arms.

"I got it I got it I got it!" she yells, and his hands come up to catch her, and then.

And then.

He pulls away. "Congratulations," he says. "I'm glad to see our hard work paid off."

_Okay. Roll with it,_ she tells herself. "There's something I wanted to tell you."

"Oh?" Sheldon turns back to his whiteboard.

"Yeah, I—can you maybe look at me when I say this?"

"_You_ interrupted _me_," he says, and keeps writing.

"Okay. Um." Spit it out, woman. "I'm sort of in love with you."

The marker in his hand squeaks to a halt. "Are you," he says. Flatline.

"Yeah," she says. "And I sort of thought that maybe you feel the same way."

"You _thought_," he says, still not facing her.

"Yeah, I—yeah. Am I wrong?"

He neither confirms nor denies her assumption, just picks up writing those long strings of nonsense.

"Sheldon? ...Say something?"

"I don't think you understand," he says, and then pauses to review what he's written. He makes a minor adjustment near the top. "I don't want this. I have a career, Penny, and your confession could only distract from that. Maybe in another decade, once I've won my Nobel—but no. I don't want any of this."

She wonders if he means that.

She wonders if he loves her.

She wonders if he could say it to her face.

"Oh," she says, and wonders if the joke is on her (he's been a jerk all along) or on her (and she just missed the signs). "Oh," she says again. "Huh."

Clearly, the joke is on her. She lets herself out of his office and closes the door from the outside.

_Bazinga,_ she thinks.

Oh.

\-----

And then she is twenty-five, and she stops running, and she stops falling.

She is twenty-five; she stands.

This is the story of how Penny has her revenge.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and excerpts from Richard Siken's [Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177722). This is six parts inaccurate nonsense and three parts me being heavy-handed, but oh, it felt good to write.

_For a while I thought I was the dragon.  
I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was   
the princess,  
cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with  
confidence  
but the princess looks into her mirror and sees only the princess,  
while I'm out here, slogging through mud, breathing fire,   
and getting stabbed to death._

\------

The first person Penny calls after opening the draft of her contract is her mother.

"Hey, tiger," her mom says. "What's up?"

"Mom, I have a contract," she blurts. "For a TV show. The network has already ordered a first season, they sent me a _contract_—"

"Oh, sweetheart. That's wonderful," her mom says. "Congratulations."

"Thanks. Thank you. I never really thought it would happen, you know?" She kicks back on her couch; the plastic wrapping crackles under her butt, and she shifts enough to de-garb the cushion. New job, new apartment, new life. She'd crack a new Penny joke here, but that's on the wrong side of lame even for someone who appreciates _My Name Is Earl_. "Is, uh, is Dad around?"

"Penny, you know he isn't—"

"Still?" Penny says. Her lips are raw from biting them. She does not let the _still_ echo any disappointment.

"Still, sweetheart," her mom says. "I'm sorry."

Penny isn't. Her father barely spoke to her even before she left Nebraska in the dust; she blames that on herself, because if she hadn't been stupid enough to leave the pamphlet from the abortion clinic under her bed—

\-----

The name she signs on her contract is Clarke. Penny Clarke. New job, new apartment, new name; she finds, in naming herself, new freedom.

\-----

Ben is her co-star. If God himself descended from the heavens and crafted the perfect man, the result would pale in comparison to Ben, who is gorgeous and witty and has dimples. Penny is dead-certain that he's hitting on her until she sees him with his girlfriend, who he treats with slavish devotion. After that they settle into a comfortable friendship, the two of them and an assistant director named Olive. Every Thursday they go out for Thai and a movie, at least until Penny and Ben become well-known enough that Olive has to pick up the carry-out by herself, at which point Netflix becomes the cornerstone of their friendship. Mondays, if they aren't taping, are reserved for football.

Olive accosts her one day over lunch. "Heeey Penny," she says, which Penny knows by now is the lead-in to a request for some outrageous favor.

"Heeey what?" Penny says, around a mouthful of corn-on-the-cob.

"Heeey, somebody pass the butter," Ben grunts. They dig for the butter dish and finally unearth it beneath a stack of reference photos. Ben shellacks his corn and goes right back to gnawing in a typically haphazard pattern. Penny, who learned to eat her corn in tidy rows at the feet of her grandmother, eyes him in disgust.

"I think you," Olive announces, "need a dog."

"A what? No, no no no—I am not letting you talk me into this."

"Yep, definitely a dog." And the next day in her trailer is a floppy-eared puppy that looks something like a beagle. That is how she meets Eddie; she thinks about protesting, about trying to return the impromptu gift to Olive, but at the first look from those liquid, dark eyes, she folds like a great collapsing Hrung. What exactly a Hrung is (she hears in pedantic tones), or why it should choose to collapse...

\-----

She doesn't think about Sheldon. Much. She still sees Howard and Raj every so often; they took her out to dinner after her premier, and Raj downed two Grasshoppers for the express purpose of congratulating her. Leonard she's seen once, maybe twice in the past year; Sheldon, not at all.

So she doesn't think about him. Olive takes over as her tech support, setting up wi-fi and fussing with the satellite dish until her coke-bottle glasses are fogged over from the humidity. Penny buys herself a game console, but does not play it on Monday nights. If her hands quiver when she meets Leonard Nimoy at a convention, he makes no mention of her weakness.

Instead of thinking about Sheldon, she buys a sailboat. The theory here is that if she doesn't think about him for long enough, she eventually won't have to try not to think about him. Eventually. It's not a perfect theory.) She buys a sailboat and teaches herself to sail, and after the second or sixth or tenth time she gets dumped into the water, she finally gets the hang of it, how to finesse the tiller and keep the boat in trim and reef the mainsail. Ten months ago, she wouldn't have had either the money or the fortitude to go out and buy a sloop, but now she doesn't think twice, just flips the cash and keeps at it until she learns to balance the art and the science that make up the craft of sailing.

She does other things, too, while she is not thinking about Sheldon. And one day, her perseverance pays off, and she is no longer _doing while not thinking about Sheldon_ and instead simply _doing_.

On that day, she takes Eddie sailing with her, and laughs when he has a sneezing fit after sticking his nose in a tidepool.

\-----

At twenty-six, she has _her own panel_ at Comic-Con. (How weird is that, Mal?) Ben plasters himself against a wall and shudders every time the noise from the conference room rises above a low row, which pretty much means he's shaking like a wet dog.

"First time at Comic-Con, huh?" she says, going for nonchalant. She can hear her heart throbbing in her ears, though, so nonchalance comes only with effort. It helps, too, that she can be the calm, experienced one while Ben acts like he's being chased by a mob of camera-toting dinosaurs.

"HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH IT," he yells.

"I can hear you, you know, we're standing right next to each other," Penny says.

"ALL THOSE PEOPLE ARE HERE FOR US." Clearly he is not listening to a word she says, so she liberates his phone from a front pocket and shoots a quick text to his girlfriend: BEN FREAKING OUT, PLS HELP.

PAPER BAG AND A SPOONFUL OF HONEY, Lianne sends back.

NO BAG, NO HONEY.

HORSE TRANQS, Lianne advises. LAST RESORT.

Before Penny can inquire where, exactly, she is going to find horse tranquilizers (it occurs to her that at this place, horse tranqs may be out of the question, but a replica Starfleet sedative might not be), their producer is calling out names.

"...Ben Lowe!" he says, and Penny lines Ben up and gives him a shove. He stumbles onstage, scratches the back of his neck, and grins. The crowd goes positively nuts.

"And finally," producer Russ says, "the one, the only—PENNY CLARKE!"

Penny steps out onstage. Like a wave, five thousand people rise to their feet, all for _her_.

This isn't why she does what she does. It isn't even why she loves what she does.

It's a dream come true anyway.

When the Q-and-A rolls around, Penny calls on a girl in the front row. "Hari's such a realized character," the pipsqueak says, even though she can't be much older than fourteen. "It's so great to see a woman in the lead role and, and, and I loved in the sixth episode when you—um." Pipsqueak snaps back to herself and flushes, but she manages to choke out, "I guess I want to—do you relate to her at all?"

Does Penny relate to an intergalactic cowgirl, wrangler of murderer and demon alike, a woman obsessed with finding a mystical city and who is the first in line to sleep with a smokin' space detective and the last to leave every battlefield?

"You know what?" Penny says. "I really do."

And what she thinks is, _Sheldon Cooper, eat your heart out._

\-----

At twenty-seven, she attends her first pre-Emmy party. It's a small gathering, cast and crew, family and friends, and from the crowd Penny picks out people: Ben and Lianne trying to coax Eddie into eating a stalk of asparagus, Olive surrounded by a handful of techies, Russ polishing his glasses as he stoically watches the televised red-carpet special. Tucked into her pocketbook is the card that arrived that morning with a fresh bouquet of daisies; _Go get 'em, tiger_, the card read.

She looks around the room at the people who populate her life, and she remembers. L.A. hasn't always been so kind to her; she was easy picking when she rolled into town and she had been picked, by a tall, handsome bodybuilder who promised to split the rent and love her forever.

And here, now, she is. Not exactly a superstar—the press hasn't heralded her as the next Julia Roberts—but, maybe, something better.

So holy crap, why is she standing here spectating?

"Hey, Olive!" she calls, and swallows the last of her champagne. "How 'bout those Raiders?"

"Hey, Penny," Olive says, "how 'bout that dog-sick on the carpet?"

"Oh, geez." Penny rolls her eyes. "I _told_ them he didn't like green vegetables, but what do I know? He's only my dog."

\-----

And at twenty-eight, she opens the door to find Sheldon standing in her hallway.

\-----

_Okay_

_so I'm the dragon._

  
"Sheldon," she says.

"Hello, Penny," he returns. He's dressed—not like a playgroup escapee, actually; he looks pretty good, in a dark navy sweater and khaki slacks. Sort of like he's just been at a business dinner and someone convinced him to ditch the plaid jacket. Penny, on the other hand, is wearing an old Cornhusker sweatshirt of her dad's and slippers that were only recently demoted from chew-toy to footwear.

"May I—" he starts, at the same time she says, "Would you like to—"

They both stutter to a halt. Sheldon tugs at the sleeves of his sweater.

"Come in and sit down," Penny says finally, stepping aside. He takes a wide path past her and stands in the middle of her studio, looking awkward and earnest, before he perches himself on a barstool. Eddie retreats to the corner of the room and lets loose a string of almost subvocal growls. "Don't mind him, he doesn't like strangers in the—" They are strangers now, but hearing the word still takes her aback.

"I can see that," Sheldon says.

"Um." Penny pushes her hair off her shoulders; she needs to get it cut soon. "I don't want to be—Sheldon, what the hell are you doing here?"

Sheldon looks at her couch, looks at her XBox, looks at her dog, looks at the staircase. "I saw you at the Golden Globes," he says. "You looked well."

"Gee. Thanks."

"I see you've gotten a dog," he adds.

"Okay, seriously, why are you sitting in my living room and trying to make small talk?" She tucks a shoulder against her entertainment center; there will be no luxury of sitting.

"Nng," Sheldon says. Penny stares.

He clears his throat, which reminds her of a deck of cards being shuffled for no reason she can explain. "That is to say—what you confessed in my office three years ago. Do you mean it?"

The worst part, the absolute _worst_ part, is the way hope catches in her throat. She'd thought she was past that, but there was a point not so very long ago when she'd pictured tall, slender children with sandy hair, when she'd daydreamed about a lifetime of sparks and late-night collaborations and comfortable arguments.

"Why do you ask?"

"I just flew back from Sweden," Sheldon says, and she knows, she _knows_ what that means and what he is asking.

"Sweden. Huh." Her fingertips are almost hidden beneath the overlong sleeves of her sweatshirt; she'd like to think that that is what's making her feel vulnerable, but she suspects the vulnerability has nothing to do with what she's wearing. "Congratulations, I guess."

"Thank you."

"You picked up some manners, too. Good for you. But you want to know if I mean it?" Penny shoves off the wall and pushes her sleeves up. "Yeah, Sheldon, I _did_ mean it."

"But not anymore?"

She shrugs. "Maybe. It's not really any of your business, is it?"

Sheldon looks like he can't decide if he should be gaping or gritting his teeth. "Does this have anything to do with my outright rejection?" he says. "I can hardly believe you'd let—"

"No," she cuts him off. "It doesn't. I have a movie in the works, did you know that? I taught myself how to sail. I have friends and a dog and a restaurant where I eat lunch every Thursday. And you, what? You think you can just show up on my doorstep and expect that I'll drop my life and fall into your arms? Sorry, buster, no dice."

Now his jaw is clenched. He nails her with an evil eye; she's surprised that he doesn't have his fingers on his temples to facilitate the explosion of her brain.

"Sheldon," she says, but now gently, the bite fading from her voice. "I've moved on. Maybe you should try it yourself."

"I need to go," he says, and now she can't tell if he's angry, or sad, or what. "I'll let myself out."

"No, that's okay," she says, and opens the door for him. "Congrats again on the Nobel. You deserve it."

"Yes," he says, stiffly. "Good-bye."

"Bye, Sheldon. Tell the guys hi for me."

And one foot still in her home, he lingers with a long hand on the frame, looking at her. "We could have been—"

"Yeah," Penny says. "I know." And then she closes the door.

She waits with her forehead pressed against the paint until she hears him move, and then Eddie nudges her ankle. "What's up, boy?" she murmurs, and he looks up at her with an expression that clearly says, _Pay attention to me!_

Penny smiles and wipes her eyes. She has a meeting with her agent about that movie, and afterwards the UCLA game is on. Eddie wants food, Russ wants her opinion on a new cast member, her mother is making noises about coming out to visit—

She may not have Sheldon, but she has the world. It's enough.


End file.
